Following a year of turbulent change, insight professionals are now preparing for 2021. We talk to Vinay Ahuja, Vice-President – Procter & Gamble Europe, Consumer Market Knowledge, Analytics & Insights, about the year ahead.
What are the key challenges and opportunities?
We certainly live in a very challenging time. I am personally optimistic that the beginning of the end of the health crisis is fast approaching so I say hang on in there; don’t lose hope! We will all look back with wonder at this period and know that we will come out of this stronger in so many ways.
That said, I recognize we are still in the midst of this storm and a tough winter may likely be ahead of us. Our societies, our consumers, our partners and our employees are still living through a difficult period and most of us who can, or are fortunate, are confined largely to home. Our overarching challenge continues to be our collective health and safety.
Next to this is the social and economic impact of the crisis that is having an unprecedented impact on our communities. If I had to list the top two challenges these would be highest on our agenda.
Then as people are sheltering at home, we also see so many new opportunities to serve and support our consumers and help them thrive in this new environment. Millions of people use P&G’s trusted brands as an important part of their daily routine to stay well and safe; and we do see broadly an elevated need for at-home consumption.
We have seen significantly increased demand especially for our Hygiene & Health products across Europe and across the world. Not just more consumption but also a shifting nature of the jobs to be done when you spend more time at home. And it is really a shifting nature of consumption in the broadest sense which is creating new and enhanced opportunities to serve our consumers. Shoppers have increasingly needed to access our products without leaving their homes and therefore we see a natural yet exponential acceleration in the growth of digital sales even for FMCG categories.
Whenever there is change, and we are all living through a very large one, there are often as many, if not more, opportunities as there are challenges. From a research perspective, especially, the biggest opportunities are to anticipate and understand the changing nature of consumer or customer needs and activating those opportunities with our brands.
What will be your priorities?
As you might expect from P&G, foremost, we are placing as our highest priority the need to preserve and protect the health and safety of our employees as well as all our partners. We are also stepping up our support across the world for the communities we operate in.
We are donating products, cash and in-kind donations to help our communities. We are producing hand sanitizer and masks in nearly a dozen manufacturing sites around the world. We donate those to hospitals, health care facilities and relief organizations. In Europe alone, P&G has contributed over $28 million in financial aid, products, masks and sanitizer to help families in need, the homeless, the elderly and those on the frontline of the crisis. It is important to recognize that providing this direct help is an important priority for us.
We know we have a responsibility. Besides the support we are providing in the form of free products or donations to society, we are also supporting local governments with our research and insight skills and capabilities. For example, we have proactively taken the initiative with no-commercial intent at all, to understand how human behavior and sentiment are shifting during the period of confinement and offered this up to the cantonal government of Geneva, Switzerland which is our headquarter base in Europe.
Understanding these human shifts is an important and timely input to help guide and shape policy interventions to save lives and livelihoods. It is time for all of us to put our skills and capacity to bear for the greater good. Especially in a time of uncertainty, anxiety and crisis we can truly continue to bring our research and insight capabilities to help the world.
From the perspective of our brands, our biggest priority continues to be the stimulation of growth of our categories and markets to serve more consumers in more meaningful ways. At P&G we place a great premium on market or category expansion because that market growth enables all stakeholders, most importantly our consumers and customers, to find increased and shared value.
Irresistible and superior brand experiences enable our brands to serve and delight more consumers thereby growing markets and categories. How do you create an irresistible experience in this period? What does superiority mean in these anxious times? The nature of the stay-at-home demand is different, so we need to update our understanding.
I expect that we will be living in this mode for some time still perhaps for many months longer. The changing and adaptive context we are living through puts an increased emphasis on our work to understand how to continue to delight and serve consumers.
There has never been a better time to be part of the insights and analytics profession. When there is so much change one needs to go back to the kitchen table. At P&G our work continues to be the secret sauce that fuels the growth of our brands. There is certainly increased appetite for it.
Which new practices will you keep from 2020 and what will you change?
Truly this crisis has also enabled us to appreciate the full power of digital or virtual connections not just with our teams around the world but especially so with consumers. It took us only a short time to accelerate our adoption and pretty quickly we have been able to organize ourselves to connect virtually with consumers as well as our retail environments at a scale that we had not done before.
To illustrate, every week for the last four weeks along with our executive leadership team, I have been able to connect with consumers of all age groups across the length and breadth of Europe; even seniors who have now embraced the use of technology anew; as well as live ‘visits’ to retail stores of all formats. For example, within 2 hours earlier this week I was able to visit live and see the store environments in 4 different counties. While not as much fun as immersing oneself personally in the real environment it has certainly been very efficient, and one can continue to learn a lot more than we might think is possible.
I can definitely see us continuing to use these capabilities often in the future. Not always, for certainly there is great value in human connections when the time is right and safe but there will be many opportunities for instance to reduce our travel carbon impact and stay close our consumers at the same time.
And which skills and ways of working will become even more important?
This year has shown us well that organizations and individuals who have been able to embrace and leverage digital technology effectively can not only survive but truly thrive in the new normal. Organizations that are effectively able to reach and serve their consumers or customers digitally in real-time; and those that are equipping and enabling their teams and individuals to access, synthetize and analyze large volumes of varied data through on-demand self-serve systems are clearly enjoying and creating further competitive advantage.
With the access to more data digitally, comes the necessary need to up-skill analytical capabilities. The integration of human insights as well as analytics becomes critical. At P&G we have since many years already brought our consumer market knowledge and data analytics teams under one Analytics & Insights organization because if you can learn how to mix oil and vinegar well you can have one potent salad dressing. Putting them together is only a starting point. Innovating with new capabilities to create unique understanding of our consumers, shoppers and markets continues to be important and I expect will be even more vital given the changes around us.
